When I first took this out of the box, I wasted no time hooking it right up and seeing what all the hype was about. Rather than reading the owners manual, I thought it would be more fun to just see if I could figure it out (I don’t need no stinkin manual!). After about 30 seconds I was up and rolling, and I must say this is pretty simple to use, if you can use a VCR, you can use this recorder. I was easily able to record, burn and manage all my recordings without having to read through the manual (and it’s a fairly big manual).